Web of Spider-Man 25 (Apr. 1987)

Whenever I went to the grocery store with my mom, it was usually so I could browse the magazine and comic book racks while she did the shopping. In the early '80s, I was looking for the newest Archie digests. In the late '80s, I had begun reading other types of comics. One cold day in early 1987, I was browsing the racks and had picked out a book for myself, probably the latest G.I. Joe, X-Factor, or Daredevil, and sweetly asked my mom to buy it for me (these grocery store trips, you see, were how I supplemented my allowance-purchased comic books). She agreed, but asked me to pick out something for my brother too, because our mother is nothing if not fair.

The hitch in this plan was that my brother wasn't a big fan of comics. He read a few here and there, but wasn't nearly as interested as I was. So I couldn't simply pick out the latest issue of whatever he read because he didn't read any series regularly.

I chose Web of Spider-Man 25 for him because, well, Spider-Man. I can only guess why I chose this particular book and not, say, Amazing Spider-Man 287 or Spectacular Spider-Man 125 (which were on the rack at the same time): The ASM book states that it's "part four" of "Gang War" and the SSM book doesn't even have Spidey on the cover. Plus, Spidey's getting squeezed to death by a badass alien on the cover of WSM, and my brother and I were big into sci-fi back then. I suppose that's why Web of Spider-Man is the one I picked for him.

In any case, it turned out to be a good choice. Mike read it and liked it enough to begin reading Web of Spider-Man regularly, which in turn led to him reading Amazing Spider-Man regularly about a year later. This was great for me because it meant I could read both Spider-Man books without having to spend my money on them. Thanks, Mike!

Daredevil 3 (Aug. 1964)

In 1986 my allowance didn't amount to much. I recall earning maybe two or three dollars a week for yardwork and various chores around the house. So I had to choose my comic book purchases judiciously, especially since I also spent my money on books and records. Fortunately, Vintage Books and Comics priced their back issues reasonably--often, in fact, cheaper than the new comics (which were 75 cents at the time). So I was able to load up on older comics for 50 cents or even a quarter apiece.

But sometimes I would discover a big-ticket item in one of Vintage's many back-issue longboxes, and I'd kneel there for a while with the book in my hand, doing math in my head. The first such book I pondered was Daredevil 3. Published more than twenty years earlier, it was the oldest comic book I'd ever seen in person. It wasn't in great shape (most collectors would probably have put it in the "good" category) and it was priced at five dollars. Compare that to an LP, which cost about ten dollars at the time, or a mass market paperback, which cost about four or five dollars new. Even as a fan of comics, I felt that 22 pages of art and story didn't really compare to a three-hundred-page book, or a record that I'd listen to over and over again.

And yet, I could not force myself to put this beat-up old comic back in the longbox. Its age, its ancient-looking cover art (by Jack Kirby), its single-digit number--all this teamed up against my frugal nature and eventually triumphed. I absolutely had to have this artifact from Marvel's early days. So, with trembling hands, I put back all the other, much cheaper comics I'd planned to buy that day and took Daredevil 3 to Don at the cash register. I handed him five dollars, went home, and spent the rest of the afternoon gently turning the book's pages, as if I were inspecting one of Gutenberg's original bibles. It all seems a bit silly and overblown when I look back on it now, but my thirteen-year-old self was in awe of this book. Not just its contents but the physical book itself. It was a piece of comic book history, something that hordes of my fellow teenage fans had never seen before. These days, finding the story in this issue is easy--it's readily available in the various Marvel Masterworks or Essentials editions of the Daredevil series--but back then it was only as easy to find as the issue itself (which was decidedly not easy to find, in those pre-ebay days of yore).¹

In the coming months and years, I would eventually buy comic books that were worth more than Daredevil 3 (though, according to Mile High's website, anyway, my copy is now potentially worth between forty and seventy dollars), but Daredevil 3 remained the oldest comic book in my collection until very recently. And it's still one of my most treasured issues.

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Pointless Footnotes

¹ Besides, reading these stories in the black-and-white Essentials or even the gussied-up Masterworks formats loses a lot of the charm of the original four-color-on-newsprint printing of the story.

Archie 243 (Apr. 1975)

This comic book was a hand-me-down. Sometime in the late '70s or early '80s (I don't remember exactly when), during one of the vacations my family took to a lake in Wisconsin with my dad's brother's family, my cousin Scott gave this comic book to me. He's a few years older than me, so when I was only seven or eight years old, he seemed impossibly cool and grown-up. This was my first Archie comic book.¹

It was well-read when Scott gave it to me, and became even more well-read over the next several years. Miraculously, and unlike most of my comics from the late '70s and early '80s, its cover is still attached. But just barely.

Here's what I learned from this issue: Harry Lucey was (and still is) my favorite Archie artist. I didn't know his name back then, but his style was unmistakable, and he drew every story in this issue. Ren and Stimpy creator John K. provides a brief but thoughtful overview of the primary Archie artists on his blog, and I agree with pretty much everything he says. But what I keyed into specifically in this issue were Lucey's uses of exaggerated action, motion lines (and blobs, and stars, etc.), and creatively drawn sound effects.

In "Race against Time," Archie braves a blizzard to deliver some important papers for Mr. Lodge. He begins by using some old snowshoes, but eventually switches to using a trashcan lid as a snow sled, which results in him rocketing down the side of a hill. I love the snowball-sized snowflakes that fall throughout this story.


From "Race against Time"
In "Way to Go, Boy!" Mr. Weatherbee yells at Archie, Jughead, and Reggie, twice, for throwing things to each other in the school hallways. The panels in which Mr. Weatherbee finally loses his cool are works of art.


From "Way to Go, Boy!"
In "Clear Thinking," Archie apologizes to Reggie for insulting him, which leads to Archie and Jughead reinsulting him. The "steam from the ears" squiggles to indicate irritation were old news to me, but I'd never before seen bubbles used to the same effect. This was a Lucey staple.


From "Clear Thinking"
Last but not least, in "It's a Cool Fool," in which Archie tries to remain calm while Veronica is out on a date with another guy, he finally loses it in a way that makes Mr. Weatherbee's earlier freak-out look positively calm by comparison.


From "It's a Cool Fool"
All these little details were what made Harry Lucey's artwork come alive for me, resulting in a powerful childhood bond with the fictional gang from Riverdale. I love Dan DeCarlo's art too, but Lucey was always number one in my book.

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Pointless Footnotes

¹ Not to be confused with my first Archie digest. I don't know which I got first.

The Punisher 4 (Nov. 1987)

My family hosted a Spanish exchange student for a week in the fall of 1987, on behalf of our high school's Spanish department and my sister, who was a junior that year. I don't remember the exchange student's name, but she was 16, from Barcelona, and extremely cute. Also, her accent was amazing. Her grasp of the English language was limited, of course, and I couldn't yet speak a word of Spanish (though that would be my foreign language of choice when I began studying it the following year), so we didn't really talk to each other. Plus, I was only a freshman (which, when you're that young, means I might as well have been a toddler as far as she was concerned).

However, on the second or third afternoon of her stay with us, my sister told me that the exchange student (I wish I could remember her name!) liked to read English-language comic books to help her learn the language, and did I have any that she could borrow?

I remember perceiving this request as a golden opportunity. An opportunity for what, though, I wasn't quite sure. To impress her? To start a conversation? An international love affair? Ultimately, being a shy kid, I simply hoped for the first possibility and gave my sister a handful of comics to lend to her new Spanish friend.

I don't remember all of the comics I gave to her to read,¹ but I vividly recall that The Punisher issue 4 (which had just been published) was one of them. I suppose, at the age of 14, I believed that the Punisher was the kind of character that a more grown-up kid would like, and would thus prove to the exchange student how mature I was.

[At this juncture, please feel free to roll your eyes and/or make a sympathetic pity face for my 14-year-old self's benefit.]

It goes without saying that an assault-rifle-toting paramilitary vigilante with a giant skull painted on his chest is not likely to appeal to a 16-year-old girl from Barcelona (or from anywhere, really). And rather than revealing my "true nature" as a mature young man (or maybe "cool" is what I was going for, whatever that ill-defined quality means to a 14-year-old), this issue more likely gave her the impression that I was a weird little creep with a gun fetish who regularly shoplifted copies of Soldier of Fortune magazine from the drugstore and played cowboys and indians with his friends.² Did I understand girls at all when I was 14? No, clearly, I did not.

Regardless, the exchange student was mute on her appraisal of the comics I lent to her. I never heard what she thought about them; they were returned to me, without comment except for a beautifully accented "Thank you," at the end of her stay with us. Before she left she gave me a yellow 1992 Barcelona Olympics T-shirt,³ which I loved and wore at least once a week for years until it disappeared--not long before the Olympics actually took place in Barcelona in '92, ironically enough.⁴

This was the first and only time I'd give comic books to a girl to read--until seven years later, when I was a senior in college and my girlfriend read my copy of Alan Moore's Watchmen to prepare herself for reading my senior honors thesis (on Hegelian notions of identity explored in the characters of Rorschach and Doctor Manhattan, among others).⁵ But that's a story for another post.

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Pointless Footnotes

¹ In the fall of 1987 I was regularly reading G.I. Joe, X-Factor, The 'Nam, Daredevil, The Silver Surfer, and The Punisher, so it would have been some combination of those--but mostly Daredevil and X-Factor, I'm guessing.

² For the record, I neither was nor did any of these things.

³ The International Olympic Committee had selected Barcelona as the host of the '92 Olympics in the fall of 1986.

⁴ Another clothing-related detail I recall: While she was here she bought a bunch of Levi's jeans to give to her friends back home because, apparently, Levi's were really expensive in Europe in the '80s.

⁵ See particularly Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1976) and Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).

G.I. Joe Yearbook 2 (Mar. 1986)

You may have noticed I've not had much to say about the specific content of the books I've been discussing thus far. If so, congratulations! You have hit upon a very important point: namely, that my understanding of quality with regard to story and art was still, at the age of 13, somewhat underdeveloped. Larry Hama's G.I. Joe scripts were adequately compelling in the way that soap operas and other serials are compelling, and you could, for the most part, tell his characters apart from one another without having to resort to looking at their uniforms. Likewise, Rod Whigham's pencils (among many others') illustrated the characters and, perhaps more importantly, the military hardware and vehicles with workmanlike precision, but without anything that my young teenage mind would identify as artistic self-expression. In other words, if you asked me to distinguish Whigham's pencils from those of fellow Joe pencilers Mike Vosberg or Frank Springer--or even Herb Trimpe--I wouldn't have been able to do it.

Enter Michael Golden. In the G.I. Joe Yearbook 2, Golden penciled the book's one story, about the Joes' Soviet doppelgängers, the Oktober Guard, battling Cobra forces. The story itself involves Cobra laying a trap for the Oktober Guard to steal their new laser cannon, which they're field testing on some Afghan rebels, blah blah blah. It's no more interesting than any other story in G.I. Joe, but look at that those camels' faces! Setting aside the fact that they're being slaughtered by some seriously cold-blooded Soviets, those are some beautifully rendered expressions.

And check out Golden's rendition of Destro. Some Joe fanboys might point out that Destro is supposed to be wearing a rigid steel mask that doesn't change expressions, but with a panel like this, who cares? Golden has filled Destro's face with more life in this panel than Destro had in all the other panels in which he'd been drawn (by other Joe artists) combined.

Yet even though Golden's forte is clearly people and faces, you can see from this panel that he could instill the vehicles and weaponry (which were so important to this serial 32-page advertisement for war toys) with just as much life and action as the characters.

And finally this page, on the left, may be the best drawn page in G.I. Joe's history. Look at the Televipers flying off the HISS tank in the first panel, the Baroness's hair in the second, Daina's little 'x's for eyes after the Baroness clocks her in the third, Daina's revenge in the fourth, and Firefly's bug-eyes in the last panel. Brilliant visual storytelling.

This is the book that showed me what comic book artists could be capable of creating. After reading the G.I. Joe Yearbook 2 I had much higher expectations, and finally began to develop my artistic tastes.

G.I. Joe 23 (May 1984)

My parents are "lake people" in the sense that they grew up spending their summers on a lake, and so as I grew up I was a "lake person" too, except that I didn't like it very much. I've never liked swimming, boats aren't that exciting to me, and, because we would go to a lake 500 miles away from my hometown, I'd invariably have to leave my friends behind for weeks or sometimes even months at a time.

But that remote outpost, sitting nine hours north of all my friends, did have one important saving grace in my eyes: a comic book shop. It took half an hour to drive from our lake house to downtown Cheboygan, where Taurus Comics stood, but every time we went into town I'd beg my parents to drop me off at Taurus for a few hours while they did their own shopping. As comic shops go, it was perhaps slightly larger than Vintage Books and Comics, and about the same size as 25th Century Five & Dime, but of course its inventory of back issues was completely different, and that's what made Taurus Comics such an exciting store to visit.

In the summer of 1986 I made my first trip to Taurus Comics, having only recently begun reading the kinds of comics one would need to visit a comic book shop to buy. And I was deep into my hunt for older issues of G.I. Joe to fill out the series, of which, at that point, I still had only a handful of issues prior to issue 42. So when I saw that Taurus Comics had quite a few earlier issues of G.I. Joe in their back-issue bins I became very excited, and when I saw the hand-written price tags stuck to their polyethylene bags my eyes practically bugged out of my head. I picked up issue 23, walked nonchalantly over to the guy behind the counter, and asked, "Is this really the price?" He took the book from me, looked at the price (65 cents), and said, "Yep."

I suppose I'd expected older issues of G.I. Joe to be selling for, I don't know, $3, $4, $5. My perception of the series, since I now cared about it, was that it must be popular and, therefore, in demand--thus, expensive. This perception was partly supported by the mail order companies who ran ads in the current issues of Marvel's comics. I remember ordering many issues of G.I. Joe from a company called American Comics, and I seem to recall routinely spending more than a dollar on those issues. So to find an issue that was so much older than any of the others I'd found thus far (a whole two years old! Amazing!) that cost only a nickel more than its cover price, was incredible to me. You can bet I bought this issue, along with a handful of others that day. And, as I mentioned before, I made several more trips to Taurus Comics that summer, as well as in subsequent summers for the next five years or so, until I went off to college and no longer spent my summers on Mullett Lake.

Taurus Comics was renamed Comics North! in the early '90s when it was bought by the store's manager, Dave Elyea. While Googling Taurus Comics for this entry I just learned that Comics North!, like Vintage Books and Comics before it, burned down back in 2009. Unlike Vintage, Comics North! apparently never reopened.

Archie 300 (Jan. 1981)

This issue of Archie is somewhat unusual in that it contains a single, 22-page story (albeit broken up into four parts) rather than a bunch of unrelated six-page stories (the standard length of an Archie story). But the reason this issue is of special note to me is that it was the comic book that tried to prove to me that the comics I got ahold of weren't ever going to be worth much money.

You'll note the cover has a "Special Collector's Edition" balloon on it. The balloon is all jagged and exciting, seeming to indicate that this issue will be of some worth. So the next time my dad took me to Caveat Emptor (the used-bookstore, previously mentioned here) I brought this issue with me and, with some excitement, asked the guy behind the counter how much I could get for it. He was very nice to my 9-year-old self and let me down gently. It was, practically speaking, worthless.

A year or two later, in sixth grade, I'd receive this same lesson secondhand, from a friend who'd received a few '70s-era issues of Batman and The Phantom from an uncle and, since he had no interest in comics, had taken them over to 25th Century (one of Bloomington's comic book shops, also previously mentioned here) to see if he could get some money for them. Again, the answer was not really. In that case, my friend just handed them over to the guy behind the counter anyway, since he didn't want them.

I, of course, still really liked Archie, so I kept this issue. Even though, I have to say, the story itself is kind of terrible. It's one of those that breaks the fourth wall so as to celebrate Archie's 300th issue within the book. Basically, everyone's running around trying to get away from Archie, and Archie starts to take it personally, until the end when it's revealed that they've all be trying to plan a surprise party for him. Great artwork by Dan DeCarlo, though.

And what could I get for this issue now? According to Mile High Comics, probably about $3 (considering the condition it's in). That's a 600-percent increase from the cover price! And it only took 32 years....